'Kim Jong-il' on Serious Eats

North Korea now has its first-ever pizzeria. The Guardian reports: An obsession with pizza stretching back at least 10 years prompted the isolated nation's dictator, Kim Jong-il, to authorise North Korea's first Italian restaurant, which opened in December, according to a pro-Pyongyang newspaper published in Japan. "General Kim Jong-il said that the people should also be allowed access to the world's famous dishes," the restaurant's manager, Kim Sang-Soon, was quoted as saying in Choson Sinbo, a Tokyo-based newspaper seen as a mouthpiece for the regime. In a lengthy three-part series for Asia Times in 2001 (1, 2, 3), Italian... More

We always enjoy bringing you pizza news, even moreso when it ties in with current events. That's why we've been sitting on the following epic tale for months, waiting for that chubby pipsqueak Kim Jong Il to rear his nattily-coiffed (and nutty) head. With last night's debate touching on nuclear proliferationspecifically in North Koreaand with that tragic country's so-called "Dear Leader" squaking recently about his country's having gone nuclear (or, "noo-cue-lur" as our dear leader pronounces it), well, this material couldn't be timely enough. Our more voracious readers may have seen this elsewhere, perhaps even years ago, but we... More